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What's wrong with EXT4? It's still superior to any other Linux file system...

Ext4 is ok for practically anyone ... but not where you would want features like dedupe, compression, data integrity (checksumming&raid), snapshots & clones (and the possibility to "transfer" them) ... and such (read: technical enviroments)

PulseAudio was also included in Ubuntu ... remember their bloody show opening? took some time for PA to mature, being there as a default or an option doesn't make it stable and tested (specially on ubuntu and fedora, lol)
Btrfs at the moment has no stable on-disk format, no fsck tool yet, and the extensive testing that ZFS had through all these years ... Some friends of mine had really ugly experiences with btrfs and I see there's a double speech in there about btrfs readiness.

I wouldn't *rely* on btrfs for the kind of deployment that would need a fs of such characteristics.

Regards.

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The guys behind ZFSonLinux are doing pretty good stuff!
I have ZFS on my netbook (powered by AMD E350), it even boots from ZFS. I use only the snapsot and compression features. Snapshots already saved my life twice in this year.
I tried btrfs with my collegue half year ago. We got kernel panic in three weeks. My collegue has still keeping his hdd waiting for a working fsck in order to be able to restore some valuable data.

Comment

What's wrong with EXT4? It's still superior to any other Linux file system...

Apples and Oranges. EXT4 is a fine filesystem and generally only hated on by the segment who wants to believe anything different than the mainstream is better. However, if you're interested in setting up something like a very large software raid 5 file server, ZFS is several magnitudes better suited for the task than a simple filesystem like EXT4 or (at this time) BTRFS.

PS - BTRFS is selectable for Ubuntu 12.04 as well. I've installed four machines with it recenlty. So far, so good.

Comment

What's wrong with EXT4? It's still superior to any other Linux file system...

ext4 is widely used, but that is the only good thing about it. It is dramatically inferior to ZFS in performance, data integrity and features. Even if you consider filesystems in the tree, it is by no means the best. XFS has a better feature set. tmpfs has better performance. LogFS has superior data integrity.

Lets talk about data integrity. Linus Torvalds complained about one ext4 issue a few years ago and some hacks were put into place to reduce the pains caused by them, but the problem is still there:

ext4 journals only metadata by default, so if something does go wrong, you can lose data. Using fsck.ext4 to repair the filesystem will bring the filesystem into a consistent state, but it only does that. Being consistent doesn't mean that your data is still there. Running fsck.ext4 will do nothing to fix data corruption caused by a crash or even report it.

There are also other issues, such as a lack of checksumming. Recently, an extension was done for inode checksumming, which helps, but it only covers inodes and it doesn't provide the kernel with the general ability to fix things if the checksum fails:

There is no redundancy in ext4 at all. It relies on things like hardware RAID for that. This promotes situations where hardware is used that ignores barriers. ext4 relies on barriers to maintain consistency after a crash provided that fsck.ext4 is used to repair it. Ignoring barriers breaks whatever consistency guarantees ext4 was able to provide. That is not to say that other filesystems are immune (they are not), but ext4 requires other things to provide redundancy while ZFS does not.

I could also talk about performance and features, but if a filesystem can't keep your data safe by design, it isn't worth using.